


jokes about my condition

by MissjuliaMiriam



Series: Bad Things Happen Bingo [1]
Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: Angst, Biting, Dissociation, Other, References to substance abuse, Self-Hatred, Suicidal Thoughts, Vampire AU, Very Dubious Consent
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-11
Updated: 2019-02-11
Packaged: 2019-10-26 05:28:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,830
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17739881
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MissjuliaMiriam/pseuds/MissjuliaMiriam
Summary: Juno wakes up face-down in an alley and knows right away that this time isn't like every other time. Something is wrong. Something isvery, very wrong.





	jokes about my condition

**Author's Note:**

> This is both a fill for my Bad Things Happen Bingo Card [(found here)](http://motherfuckingnazgul.tumblr.com/post/182717285652/heres-my-bad-things-happen-bingo-card-im-taking) and the Tragic Backstory for a larger vampire AU I'm working on. This is... really extremely fucked up. The forthcoming longer vamp fic will be less fucked up. I made a series listing, so go subscribe there if you want to be notified when I post it.
> 
> Additionally, BIG WARNINGS for how suicidal Juno is in this. It's set during a dark period of his life, even leaving aside the trauma that he goes through in the actual fic itself, and he's really in a bad mindset. Please take care of yourself; don't read this fic if suicidal thoughts, discussion of Sarah Steel (not so much her behaviour as Juno's feelings about her), and references to drug abuse will trigger you.
> 
> Title from The Mountain Goats' "Against Agamemnon."

Juno wakes up face-down in an alley and knows right away that this time isn't like every other time. Something is wrong. Something is _very, very_ _wrong_ ; his head is aching and his stomach is churning and everything beneath his skin feels like _fire_ , like he's burning. It hurts so much. Normally inside his own mind at least he'd have more eloquent words, but the screaming discomfort has reduced him to a wailing child: _ouch, ow, please, it hurts!_ _Help me, it hurts!_

He's been hungover. He's suffered through withdrawal from basically every chemically addictive drug that you can get on Mars (thanks Cecil; also, fuck you), but this is nothing like any of that. It's _deep_. And he feels different, like the pain is changing him.

He wishes he could remember, but he can't—right now all he can do is moan and curl around himself, shaking, a tense tight ball of suffering on the dirty ground of some dismal Hyperion alleyway, and he knows he's been here before but he _hasn't_ , God, what's happening to him. Why is this happening to him?

After what feels like a long time he manages to shove some thinking past the pain and manages to move, opens his eyes and then closes them again because the light pierces into his brain like a stabbing knife—and wouldn't it be nice if someone actually _did_ ram a knife into his skull right about now, that'd at least put him out of his misery. But he's alone and bizarrely still has his wallet, which means that he hasn't been mugged. He can't really assess his physical condition beyond the overwhelming skin-crawling burn of whatever's happening to him, he can't tell if he's been beaten or fucked or both, but he figures he's been drugged or poisoned with something new and that if he lies here much longer someone's going to come along and take advantage, and not in the fun way. So, his arms trembling, he forces himself up off the ground. Moving is so hard that it makes him physically sick, and when he's done retching into a corner behind a dumpster he has to kneel there for a while and clutch his ribs and try not to shake apart into a million tiny pieces. He wants to _die_.

But he doesn't, no matter hard he thinks about it, and so he has to stumble up off the ground and swallow the bile and pray that he doesn't pass out in the street as he begins to walk, one unsteady step at a time, to... somewhere. Anywhere but here.

When he emerges out onto the street proper, still squinting against the light, he finds he's downtown, not far from Valles Vicky's and that... that reminds him of something. Memory intrudes past pain, and he recalls sitting in the Vixen Valley, drinking. Someone had approached him, he thinks. He doesn't — he doesn't know them, can't remember their face. But maybe Vicky saw, saw what they did to him. So he starts in that direction. She'll be closed this early in the morning, but she might open up for him. Or maybe he can just lie down in front of her door for a while, until whichever vixen opens in a few hours stumbles over his half-conscious body. Maybe his dead body, by then.

The walk through the streets brings back another few flashes of memory. Following someone's broad back, his wrist in their hand. He was stumbling drunk at the time, which is probably part of why he can't remember. It's all a dark haze. Then... turning into that alley. Pushed against a wall, and.. and... _fuck_. Still lost in thought, straining for memory, Juno nearly trips over Vicky's doorstep and brains himself on the knob. He doesn't, regains his balance at the last moment, and manages to get up the two steps to the door. He knocks, a bit feeble, and then summons enough energy to _really_ knock, slamming the side of his fist against the door with everything that he's got left in him. He doesn't have the energy or the breath past the fire in his lungs, his limbs, his _everything_ , to shout, and so he slumps down with his back against the door and tilts his head back against it.

He nearly passes out again in the few minutes it takes for someone to arrive and yank the door open. Juno falls backwards and smacks the back of his head against the ground, a small agony that barely registers against the backdrop of the rest, and opens his eyes again to find himself staring up at an irate Valles Vicky.

“What the hell're you doin' banging on my door at this garbage hour, Juno Steel?” she demands. Her voice is really unnecessarily loud.

“Don't know,” Juno offers weakly. “Think I might be dying. Figured if I knocked loud enough you'd come put me out of my misery.”

She glares down at him for another minute, her eyes narrowed, and then suddenly they go wide. “Aw, hell,” she says. “Hell and fuck. Get up, come in.”

 _What?_ Juno can't follow her with his eyes as she walks away, has to roll over to see her heading back deeper into the club, toward the lounge area.

“Come on!” Vicky shouts after a moment. “I know you're in pain right now but lyin' there ain't gonna help.”

Juno would like to say he grunts, but it's more of a whimper. Either way, he makes it up off the ground again and follows Vicky. She's gone into the lounge, instead of to her office or to the bar, and when he catches up he finds she's sitting on one of the long couches. She pats the seat next to her and, bemused, Juno obeys.

“You were here last night, weren't you?” she says, once he's sitting. Well, sitting: slumped into the crease of the couch, disgustingly grateful for how soft it is.

“Yeah,” he says. “Did you see what... whoever I was with did to me? 'Cause I feel like shit.”

“I know,” she says, her voice oddly soft. “Listen, Juno. I wasn't watching, but... I'll check the cameras. I'll find the person who did this, I promise you that—ain't none of _those_ types welcome in my club, that's for sure.”

“Those types?”

She takes a deep breath. “What do you know about vampires, Juno?”

Juno's mind just. Stops. Only for a moment, and then, slowly, he reaches up and places a hand over his eyes. He doesn't know what his face is doing, but if it betrays even a fraction of the misery he's feeling he can understand how gentle Vicky is being, because... no. God, no. Please.

“So, something, then,” she says after a moment.

“Yeah,” Juno croaks, when he can find his voice again. “Yeah, you could say that.”

The words bring back memories. First old ones, _old_ ones, of his mother smiling at him and his brother over the dinner table, each of them with a place of food and her with a glass of blood. Then less old: her fangs flashing as she snarled at him. And then from last night. Being shoved against the wall of that alley, kissing and grinding. He was so fucked up on drink and drugs that he was only half-aware of what was going on, but he'd been into it. And then his partner had left a trail of sucking kissing down his neck, and then bitten down _hard_ , the fangs that had been hidden tearing through his skin. Juno reaches up in the present with one hand and touches his throat, feels the raw, half-healed wound there. Worse than any vampire bite he'd ever seen, sloppy and jagged.

Vicky leans forward and tugs at his collar to bear the wound, hisses when she sees it. “That _fucker_ ,” she says. “Whoever they are, they ain't never coming back to my bar. I'm sorry, Juno; I usually take better care to keep those sorts out.”

“They could have just left me to bleed out, I guess,” Juno says blankly. He wishes they had. He can remember now too their voice, the panicked swearing when they realized that the bleeding wasn't stopping. The heat of a hastily opened cut in their own arm pressed against his throat, then the metallic taste of their blood in his mouth. This agony, the fire in him, _changing_ him... he would have died in that alley without it, and wishes that whoever that vampire was had cared just a little less about their most recent _donor_.

“I'll make sure you've got some resources to help you with the change,” Vicky is promising, low-voiced. “Make sure you're taken care of until the transition's over and you're back on your feet, help you learn control, that stuff. Your sire clearly ain't gonna do it, and you'll need it. Where're you staying right now, Juno?”

“I have a place,” Juno says. He feels very distant from himself, and at the same time all too close. He'd known distantly that the Vixen Valley was patronized by vampires because he knew how to spot 'em; he'd known that Vicky was one for the same reason, but he'd always avoided this part of Hyperion's underworld and the vampiric presence was never why he'd make himself a patron to Vicky's bar. He should have known. Blood always tells, isn't that the saying? Letting himself get anywhere near any vampires was always going to end this way, with him carrying her curse in yet another way.

Absently, Juno answers a few more of Vicky's questions, finds himself agreeing to stay at the Vixen Valley in a spare room for a few nights so that someone in the know can keep an eye on him. He promises to call Rita, knows he won't; she'll forgive him, it's fine. Or she won't, and that'll be fine too.

Juno just stares at the ceiling and relives the feeling of that vampire's teeth sinking deep over and over. They had bitten down so hard that their incisors had cut through his skin as well, not just their sharpened fangs, tearing open the veins in his throat. It had hurt. At first, it'd been the sort of pain he liked, and then he'd gone rapidly lightheaded and known something was irreparably fucked. If he'd known then what _way_ it would end up fucked, he'd have told them then to let him die.

Instead he has to live. With a scar on his neck and this fire burning in his blood, that he'll never ever be rid of, inhuman, animal hunger riding him whenever he goes too long without stealing life from someone else. He's a parasite now, and he's _never_ wanted this; he's known his whole life about vampires and never, not once, has he wanted it, no matter what perks it might come with. Too late now.

Too late now.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Hopefully you... well. Enjoyed? I guess? I'm sorry.
> 
> I did write this in like an hour and Did Not Proofread, so please tell me if there are typos.
> 
> Anyway, comments... might motivate me to make the next BTHB fill slightly less traumatic for everyone involved?


End file.
